“... whose new project is a study of the criminal mind – Dickens, meanwhile, would have been writing Oliver Twist. While Oates has a very nasty time, largely self-inflicted, Maggs is rescued by a serving girl who brings him to his senses: Maggs should give up on the worthless Phipps and go straight back to his real children in Australia; and he does, taking her ...”

“... for the rich and another for the poor; ‘Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law,’ ran Oliver Goldsmith’s lapidary line. But the functioning of the law, Thompson stressed, necessarily involved negotiated compromises: because it needed legitimacy, it had to possess a power not primarily coercive but consensual. To sustain hegemonic authority, the ...”

“... hoor with a range of examples from the writings of Patrick Kavanagh, Brian Friel, Tim Pat Coogan, Oliver St John Gogarty, Neil Jordan and Hugh Leonard. It’s a method that seems to be at once academically sound and, for those committed to a long weekend in England and Wales carrying only one bag and one book, perfect for a bit of one-way crack, or ...”

“... hill, the ‘Matterhorn’ of the title, Bravo Company is told to abandon it to search for North Vietnamese Army units in the valley below, and then, when the NVA have taken the hill, to retake it from them in the novel’s climactic battle scene. The marines struggle with leeches and jungle rot. They elude snipers and landmines – or don’t. They ...”

“... anything resembling a human name. Roanoke, of course, was the site of the first English colony in North America, where in 1590, five years after their arrival, all the settlers were found to have disappeared. Everything about Herrera’s story suggests that people are perfectly capable of being expunged.The story is called ‘House Taken Over’, and the ...”

“... had the stamina to argue her opponents under the table, and because Harold Wilson let her do so. Oliver Cromwell could not forget that he embodied the hopes of a radical army, and so in the end he refused the crown. Harold Wilson could not forget that he had once embodied the hopes of people like Barbara Castle, and he let her get away with murder. When he ...”

“... been detected near the Channel and it has taken firm hold in the woodlands of the Haute-Saône in north-eastern France. The French, who are normally interventionist (they spray their oak woodlands from helicopters), have struck a fatalistic note on C. fraxinea, which arrived about five years ago. They made the same case against felling that Defra made in ...”

“... Among the objects of hatred and ridicule in English memory the regime of Oliver Cromwell’s Major-Generals has a towering place. The division of the country, in 1655, into 12 districts administered by killjoy Puritan commanders was a brief episode, in effect lasting less than a year, but it has been reviled and derided from that time to this ...”

“... months he gained an immense following, not only in the Ottoman Empire but among Jews throughout North Africa, Europe and Central Asia. He also attracted quite a few non-Jewish adherents. The Sultan, fearing that Sabbatai might be trying to usurp his power, had him arrested and incarcerated in the Dardanelles, first in the notorious Bagno prison, then in ...”

“... an extra 3d for Poets’ Corner and the nave, and an extra shilling for the royal tombs and north transept. These days it’ll cost you £25, plus another £4.50 for the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Galleries (worth it, in my opinion, for the effigy of Nelson and another from 1686 of Charles II in one of his own outfits). This makes it, by my ...”

“... Sam’ projected the essence of ‘jungle’ techniques. Following the example of King Oliver, they developed a wider variety of often speech-like growling and wa-wa sounds by humming and/or gargling gutturally in their throats while blowing legitimate musical notes on brass instruments that were distorted by various metal mutes and/or the manual ...”

“... allowing a glimpse of Venice across the lagoon, then retreats into the campagna. As we headed north, the hills bulked larger and darker. We got off the train at Conegliano, just north of Treviso, where we caught a bus to Tezze di Piave. I picked some straggly poppies at the roadside. Tezze is a small town, much prized ...”

“... of class and sex. Alger Hiss was not exactly a patrician but he had been a law clerk for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes; he had been one of the bright boys of the Roosevelt New Deal and he had been energetic and instrumental in setting up two of the pillars of the postwar liberal American imperial order – the United Nations and the Carnegie Endowment for ...”

“... Museum, the Museum of Anthropology in Cambridge, the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, the Great North Museum in Newcastle and the Church of England have all committed to returning their collections (or are ‘open to all possibilities’). Jesus College, Cambridge is in the process of returning a bronze cockerel. The British Museum is prevaricating behind a ...”

“... down to ten (about the same as Ian Fleming and better than P.G. Wodehouse). On the links at North Berwick, when he made a bad shot, he would turn away and gaze over the Forth and then turn round again, smiling. At times he sounds like a fully paid-up member of the Drones club. No one, after all, was better equipped to live a life of a sporting ...”